Experts have long feared that unscrupulous geo-engineers could decide to change the climate – without in-depth knowledge of atmospheric physics, without consultation with science and society, without a consensus on the means and goals. Technically, this would be relatively easy and cheap to do. “A ‘Greenfinger’ – a self-proclaimed protector of the planet – could do a lot of geoengineering on his own,” US political scientist David Victor warned more than ten years ago, referring to the James Bond villain Goldfinger.
There is some evidence that this is exactly what has already happened. Start-up Make Sunsets claims to have released sulfur particles into the stratosphere using weather balloons. Like a volcanic eruption, these particles should reflect sunlight back into space and thus slow down global warming.
Not even the start-up itself knows whether this worked as planned. It was founded last October. Co-founder and CEO Luke Iseman was previously the hardware director at the incubator Y Combinator. According to him, the first two balloon launches took place in April 2022 in the Mexican state of Baja California, months before the company was founded. He pumped a few grams of sulfur dioxide into the weather balloons and added enough helium for them to rise into the stratosphere and burst there, Iseman reports. It’s unclear what actually happened to the balloons because they didn’t have GPS trackers on board.
